10.27.05

Greasemonkey Del.icio.us Director

Posted in Web, Technology at 2:23 pm by Danny Dawson

Updated 2005-12-15 to add trailing slash to list of included sites.

As much as I love Johnvey Hwang's Del.icio.us Director, I got really tired of having to click his bookmarklet every time I loaded my del.icio.us links page, so I created a Greasemonkey script to do it for me. In all honesty, his bookmarklet was already optimized to become a greasemonkey script, so it only took me a minute or two to convert it.

What took a bit longer was creating an easy way to share the GM script with others. With a little javascript/php/mod_rewrite action, I eventually came up with a clean, efficient method to generate user-specific scripts on-the-fly. To get your own, follow the directions below.

(This script was tested on Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 and Greasemonkey 0.5.3. Your mileage may vary with other configurations.)

If you haven't already done so, get del.icio.us.


 

After submitting the above information, a pink-highlighted link should appear below. Right-click this link and click "Install User Script...". To finish installing the script, click "OK" on the dialog that appears.

Once all that's done, every time you visit your own del.icio.us page, the Director should auto-load.

If you experience any problems with the script generator, or have questions or suggestions, I welcome them in the comments. I'm notified via email anytime someone comments on my weblog, so I will get back to you eventually if you include accurate contact information.

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10.20.05

Flock: Flying towards an (eventual) goal

Posted in General at 4:27 pm by Danny Dawson

So here I am, blogging from inside Flock, the “next-generation web browser”.  I’ve got to keep reminding myself that this is a “Developer Preview - 0.5pre” else I get too excited, and thereby disappointed. There are certainly a lot of bugs, and a lot of features don’t yet seem intuitive, but there’s definitely potential on its way to being realized.

The primary advantages of Flock are being discussed all over the web: easy viewing of Flickr photos (from anyone’s account), drag-and-drop blogging (to an extent - see below), integration with del.icio.us bookmarks, etc.

There are a number of things that still need work, though, the first few of which I’m listing here:

  1. I have bookmarks that I need available in my Default Favorites (aka the Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox) that I can by no means post to del.icio.us. I’d get fired. How can I exclude selected bookmarks from syncing with del.icio.us?
  2. The wysiwyg editor for blog posting needs a little love. After the first item in a list, if I press Return, it should create a second item. Instead, I have to edit the HTML manually (not really a big deal, but wouldn’t you know it, I discovered this bug while creating this list).
  3. When I drag a linked picture (think <a href=”"><img src=”"></a>) to the blog bar, do I want to blog the picture itself or the link? Flock doesn’t seem to know yet and seems to randomly guess for me (well, I can’t discern a pattern).

Oh, I could go on, but I suppose I should just take my gripes directly to the flock team.

And I don’t mean to detract from the pleasant advances in Flock — it is an advancement in web browsing — it just isn’t yet ready for prime time. I will be watching future developments closely. Good job so far, guys.


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